21 July 2013

Much has happened in the
three months it's taken me to get sucked in & through Simon
Urban's breakthrough novel. Katy Derbyshire's English translation of
the book was published last month by Harvill Secker, priced £15.
Around the same time, over the first weekend in June, Hessen's police
force, working under orders from Hessen's CDU Minister of the
Interior, brushed off a well-organised, 10,000 strong Blockupy demo
in Frankfurt, against the European Central Bank. The kettling tactics
used to crush a protest overwhelmingly non-violent in its motivation
were upsettingly similar to tactics used by the Metropolitan Police
to suppress student and anti-cuts demos in London over the last two
years. The Frankfurt law-enforcement officers didn't even have to use
their water cannons. Managed-democracy's most expensive hardware has
its greatest effect simply by standing there, martially: its bad PR
for a state to allow sufficient uncontrolled dissent to get itself
into a position where it actually has to make use of it. Two weeks
after no one outside of the left was saying anything about violations
in Frankfurt – where does the democratic masses' disinterest in
freedom of assembly & of collective action spring from? – the German government's
Human Rights Spokesman, the Free Democrat's Markus Löning started
feigning panic about Turkey:

“It
makes me really worried when I see the water-cannons and other
big machinery being deployed.” i